Russia's adoption policy cruel, spiteful

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed a cruel and spiteful law that will bar Americans from adopting Russian children. The new law will wreck the lives of the 46 children whose American adoptions already were under way, hundreds of other American families who had launched the adoption process, and the lives of countless children to come who now will live out their childhoods in Russian orphanages. Americans adopt nearly a thousand Russian children every year.

The worst part is, Putin did it just to thumb his nose at the Americans for daring to protest his government's loathsome human rights record.

It wasn't enough for Putin to crush dissenters and others who object to his increasingly autocratic rule - he had to bring vulnerable orphans into it, too.

The new law originally was written as a tit-for-tat response to the U.S. Magnitsky Act. Sergei Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who was beaten and left to die in a Russian prison after implicating many Russian officials in a massive fraud scheme - and in a rare bipartisan moment, the U.S. Congress passed travel and financial sanctions against those officials believed to be responsible for his death.

Those officials remain quite powerful in Russia, however - which is why the Kremlin drafted a bill to impose similar visa and asset freezes on Americans accused of violating Russians' rights abroad.

That would have been enough to make their point, wretched as that point was.

Now those children have fallen victim to a political game which has nothing to do with them and everything to do with Russian officials' outrageous sense of wounded pride. What's truly outrageous is denying these children, many of whom already had bonded with their prospective adoptive parents, the chance to have a family and a home.

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Russia's adoption policy cruel, spiteful

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed a cruel and spiteful law that will bar Americans from adopting Russian children.